what are my eating habits these days?

In a conversation with my step-sister, who has recently switched to a healthy vegan diet (she points out that many forms of candy are technically vegan, but she isn't eating them either), she asked what my eating habits are like these days. Having taken the time to type it up, I thought I would post here, too.

Expensive! I buy organic whenever it is available, and I eat lots of nuts and seeds, fresh fruit and veg (not cheap this close to the arctic circle), local when it is available (surprisingly, it sometimes is). My food log says I am typically eating:

25 to 30% starch Mostly home made breads, home made noodles, porrige, rice, or other small grains, or, less often, potato.

15 to 20% fruit This is highest in late summer when all of the berries on our property are ripe. Fruit I mostly eat raw (both fresh and frozen), but I do put black currants (we have so many bushes) in my cooking, especially things like spaghetti sauce or lasagne, and make a un-sweetened jam from them that I use the way others use ketchup, and I often put berries in breads, cakes, and cookies.

15 to 25% veg This is higher during the summer when I have plenty of garden kale and wild nettles to eat (both of which I have also dried for winter use). I also eat lost of store-bought veg, both fresh and frozen, and, in the case of a few things (tomato, artichoke, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, corn) canned.

15 to 19% protein Mostly nuts, seeds, beans and eggs, but sometimes I eat moose or reindeer as both are readily available in Sweden and neither of these trigger the same issues with my digestion as I had when I used to eat store bought meat. (Note: I haven't really tried other types of meat in years, so I don't know if it is just US and Australian meat industry products that my body objected to, or if Swedish store bought meat would also be a problem) However, even when I eat moose or reindeer, I treat it more as a spice than the main feature of the dish.

13 to 15% dairy (I dislike most forms of fat, other than butter, which I love, so unless I am cooking for a friend who is allergic to dairy, if the dish needs fat at all, I use butter). I also eat yoghurt on my muesli and berries on mornings I am feeling extra hungry (otherwise I like plain water on my muesli and frozen berries) and use yoghurt in my baking. Now that I am mostly living alone I am not bothering to buy milk, as it doesn't keep till I get around to using it, but I do have powdered milk in the house for use in baking if I am out of yoghurt.

0.8 to 1.2% junk (anything containing honey or processed sugar, or any oil that isn't dairy has a % of junk in it. Also, if I happen to eat some packaged food that contains preservatives (very, very rarely happens, and then only if I am being fed at a friends house), I count some % of that as Junk as well). I never eat store bought candy or sweet baked goods, so all of my sugar intake is in the form of home made baked goods, which I tend to make with less sugar than typical cake and cookie recipes call for. I do sometimes also use store bought jam, which contains sugar, but we buy the "low sugar" versions, and I normally only use it in baked goods, it is otherwise too sweet for my tastes.

a much too early spring

For much of November we have had lovely winter weather. There were a number of good snow falls. Last weekend we had enough snow that I spent seven hours outside shoveling over the course of the weekend, and it was grand. On Thursday instead of the soft, gentle snowfalls we had been having we had a proper snow storm, with much wind. So much wind that we wound up with waist high snow dunes crossing the yard in some places, while in others the ground was scoured nearly bare of snow. Consequently, I didn't bother trying to do much shoveling on Thursday--only cleared the path between the door and the lamp at the edge of our driveway several times, as the snow dune kept filling it up again. The final time I cleared that path on Thursday was at midnight, when the wind was dying down, which meant that it was still clear when I got up the next morning. Good thing it was, too, since when the wind died down the warm weather swooped in after it, and on Friday we reached highs of +4 C, which meant much melting and the snow drifts turned very wet and slushy.

I am so glad that David and I have a tractor, and that we had no plans for Friday, as that meant after he got home from work we could spend several hours cleaning up all of the wet, slushy snow from the driveway before it froze again on Saturday. He drove the tractor, I used the snowblower to cut through the big drift in front of the doors to the shed in which it lives, and the shovel to clean up the areas that were hard to do with the tractor (like behind my car), and to clean us the stuff that spills out from the side of the tractor scoop. Luckily, we managed to get it all cleaned up before it froze again, and even more luckily, we got a tiny hint of snow today, to cover up the dismal grey of the ice that was left between the dunes. Can we please just stay winter now till spring, and get some nice soft snowfalls, without any rain or melting thereafter?

In other news our folk dance group had our last session of the year tonight, and ended as we always do, by inviting the musicians and everyone else in the local folk dance organization to join us. As a result we had seven musicians and 14 dancers, and it was a delightful evening. While I love all forms of dance, Swedish folk dance is my favourite, and the Swedish folk music played here in Norrbotten is the best music of it all. This is truly one of the biggest reasons I am still in Sweden after 7 years when I usually move every three.